plant-powered procreation

Vegan MoFo

Actually, it started yesterday. Well and also, the deadline was in late September, so I did not actually sign up. Still! I’m going to do it anyway!

For those not already in the know, Vegan MoFo is an annual autumn online party of bloggers posting at least 20 and up to 31 posts about vegan food. If that doesn’t sound super fun to you, either you’re much cooler than I am, or you don’t really understand Vegan MoFo yet.

This year, my theme will be Things a Pregnant Vegan Eats, or alternatively Posting About Food to Ensure Accountability for Healthy Choices. I probably won’t win the award for best theme, but I didn’t officially sign up anyway and also there is no such award – I just made that up. My goal is to post one healthy food item I made for myself that day.

On to the food!

For dinner, I made the tamarind lentils from Veganomicon. This recipe was a recent discovery and it went straight into the rotation. Recipes that are easy and delicious are always popular with me (pretend that something can be popular when one person says they like it). A little tart, a little sweet, all in a nicely seasoned sauce thickened with tomato paste. Total win.

These lentils goes well with brown basmati rice. And here’s a fact about basmati rice: it’s totally worth the extra few dollars over crappy regular rice. I tend towards the frugal, possibly because I started working well before I was even qualified to get a drivers licence, or possibly because my family started out with very little. Or maybe it’s just how I am, who knows! Anyway, even though I am lucky enough to be fairly financially secure (as in, I can afford BASMATI RICE) I can’t help but gravitate towards the cheaper option. What can I say? I love a bargain.

All this is to say that for years I suffered through mushy brown rice that disintegrated into itself. I even thought I didn’t really like rice! Or that for some reason I could not master the art of cooking rice! But one day at the grocery store, instead of seeing basmati and thinking, like I usually do, “pff, I most certainly will NOT pay double for rice that just has a fancy name,” I for some reason thought, “basmati. That’s famous. Maybe it’s famous for a reason.” And you guys, it is. It is famous for a reason. And that reason is that it is delicious. It cooks into perfect, fluffy tasty grains every time. Not too dry, not too moist. Just right.

Everyone probably already knew that. Why didn’t you tell me?!

Anyway.

So for dinner I had tamarind lentils over brown basmati rice, and this is what it looked like:

As you can see, I also will not be winning any awards for food photography.